Ocelot, you can have my number and text me instead if you like.
It is absolutely horrible. Like quitting smoking in a way. Can't think of much else or be any use. The worst breakups that are complex and take self esteem from you are so hard to deal with because at the very moment you are going through something difficult, you're without your partner for support you've come to count on AND you're feeling your lowest.
I know during my worst times back then I was not "ready" to hear the real wisdom. People said things to me like "you will find someone else" or "it obviously wasn't right" or "this is just one chapter of your life" and it wasn't helpful to think of those things until much later when I was ready.
The first few months I wasn't ready to accept he was gone forever. That thought was mentally overwhelming and I think I would have been better served with thoughts like "nothing is final", "be your best self" and "nothing that is for you will go by you".
I think with those thoughts I could have relaxed from the anxiety of the separation and betterred yself, made myself strong and more "accustomed" to being alone and then when I felt stronger I might have been better placed to cope.
I remember the day Fiance left, I had absolutely NO CLUE he had someone else. Not even a whiff and almost did not believe it. He moved in with her at 11.30pm on the Monday night and at 11am on Teusday morning my most belove MIL sent me a short email to wish me well in my knew life and to say she was sorry it hadn't worked out.
I was bereft. It was like everyone knew my life was over before I did and just expected me to accept it all in one day.
I agree with RedMaple that grief of some magnitude of loss is always about accepting and not getting over. Getting over isn't really what happens. A crack appears in us, an injury and it never goes away or heals. It becomes a scar. In time that scar can make you uglier and weaker or stronger and more beautoful - depndent on how you allow the experience to trancend your life.
I read this and it really helped me when I was grieving: (edited down a bit)
^The hallmark of a human life is loss, it seems. And the body is a vessel for grief. This is not an if, but when. When is loss gonna hit?
And then it is how. How do you carry it? All that grief. And don’t even ask why. Why is not a question that grief ever answers.^
Loss doesn’t just take. It gives, too. Like a trade. I’m going to take this from you but give this to you instead: more space, cleansing tears, better questions, compassion, pathways to the center, maps to deeper wells, less distractions, blankets of darkness, little pools of light under your skin where he touched you but will never touch you again, and holes in your heart that nothing but pure love can fill.^
And then, go. Go into the world and carry these things the best you can. Let them move around and make love messes and surprise you in the mass of bone and blood and skin vessel that you are. Grocery shop with them, chop vegetables with them, go to parties and smile at people with them. Be yourself, only different now, with all that grief.
I saw one day a woman on the beach playing with her dog. I noticed as she stopped and looked at the ocean and folded her arms across herself. I saw her grief then. The way she carried it in her core. Tucked away so people might not notice.
But then it sneaked up on her, like the ocean was pulling it out of her. And she sat with it for a moment, bowed her head, maybe feeling like it was going to shatter her into a thousand grains of sand before she caught herself and tried to shake it off. But grief isn’t like that. You can’t just shake it off. It doesn’t ever really leave. It just changes. And it changes you. It shapes you. Your stance, your stride, your ways of loving and being and moving in the world. The things you do and don’t care about anymore.
And there you are, twenty years later. Sitting in your car outside the supermarket, and all at once you’re paralyzed; can’t go in because a song just came on the radio that reminds you of the person you loved and lost. The grief that you thought you’d already felt just rises up like an ocean inside you. Pummels your heart with waves and pours out your eyeballs like stormwater. You think, “All this fucking time and I still feel this grief?” And your body is saying “Yes. Yes, you do.”
You wonder what the point is, then. Wonder if you could find a way to drain those grief waters out of you for good. Only if you could take the air out of the sky and the carbon out of the stars and the forest out of the trees You see, we are made of grief. And we are meant to be.
It means we are here. It means we’re alive, even though it can make you feel like you wish you weren’t sometimes. It means we’ve risked. It means we’ve loved and lost and risen and fallen. It means we’ve been unlocked and held open despite ourselves.
That passage has very much been my experience of grief. But while I grieved him and in many ways always will - it does not mean I want him back or still love him. That goes away.
As I said, I have just been through a split. And it truly hurt me. This was the first person since fiance I think I have thought "yes, this might be the one", and I was falling in love with him. Probably already was.
I do have a broken heart, but the experience reminded me that at least my heart still works.
yours does too
xxx